Spring courses. Semiotic analysis of the image
Modern societies are possessed, one might say, sick of the image. Today, communication is heavily mediated by images, and cultural practices increasingly rely on images. One of the consequences of the rapid visualization of culture is the constant retreat of language (first of all, the literary language formed in the era of printing), which is a big problem for small cultures.
Citing the abundance and availability of technologies that enable the creation, reproduction and circulation of images is not enough to explain this reachability of the image. Walter Benjamin described the commercial passages emerging in Paris in the 1820s as "dreamscapes" whose visual appeal was an important incentive for the consumption of goods. (Probably, visitors to the first Yerevan fairs could have had such an experience in the 1990s.)
The history of advertising testifies to the growing dominance of the image over the text, as well as the growing aestheticization and attractiveness of the advertising image. In order to keep consumerism alive, the advertising image must also have a globally recognizable "vocabulary" and "syntax" that crosses cultural boundaries. And the important units of this dictionary are the brands of transnational corporations, a weighty argument in favor of the visualization of global communication.
The course will briefly discuss some cultural and ideological aspects of the photographic image, the issue of the visualization of culture and the role of the image in the process of cultural globalization.
The main elements of semiotics and the possibility of using these tools in the analysis of images (image as text) will be presented.
Examples of semiotic analysis of advertising images and photographs will be given.
List of lectures
1. Introduction: Modernity and image. Visual communication and visual rhetoric
2. The cultural background of photography and its effects
3. The main elements of semiotics. Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism and poststructuralism
4. Visual semiotics
5. What is photography theory or criticism?
6. Advertising and consumerism
7. Increasing mediation of vision by technology: A global visual language?
8. Summary, examples of analysis of photographic and advertising images.
Lecturer
Hrach Bayadyan
8 lectures
Price: 28.000 AMD